Rhino 'Cooked to Death' 9 Million Years Ago, Fossil Reveals

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About 9.2 million years ago, a teenage two-horned rhinoceros was
literally cooked to death when a Mt. Vesuvius-like eruption
enveloped it in lava reaching more than 750 degrees Fahrenheit
(400 degrees Celsius), scientists say.

The perhaps fortunate result: a well-preserved skull of the
Rhinocerotid, with a tale to tell.

An analysis of the volcanic rock-preserved skull suggests
the animal's grisly death was near instantaneous. "[T]he body
was baked under a temperature approximating 400°C, then
dismembered within the pyroclastic flow, and the skull separated
from body," the researchers wrote online Nov. 21 in the journal
PLoS ONE. The flow of volcanic ash carried the detached skull
about 19 miles (30 kilometers) north of the eruption site and to
the site where it was discovered in Cappadocia in Central Turkey.

"The articulated skull and mandible were found alone, and there
were no other rhino bones in the surroundings, except for some
rib fragments, potentially of rhino affinities," said study
researcher Pierre-Olivier Antoine of the University of
Montpellier in France. [ See
Photos of the Volcano-Preserved Rhino Fossils ]

When alive, the rhino (Ceratotherium neumayri) would
have weighed between 3,300 and 4,400 pounds (1,500 and 2,000
kilograms), about the size of a young white rhino, though
sporting a shorter head, Antoine said. The animal was 10 to 15
years old, a young adult, when it died in a
Pompeii-style eruption.

Antoine has excavated dozens of fossil skulls in the past 19
years, and he said the external surfaces of this one were "quite
unusual." For instance, "the bony surface was rough and
corrugated all around the skull and mandible, and the dentine
(the internal component of the teeth) was incredibly brittle, and
even kind of 'corroded' [in] places," Antoine told LiveScience in
an email.

When they looked at the remains under a microscope the
researchers found structural changes that suggested the animal
had been heated to the high temperatures of volcanic flows.

"There was not a real volcano, but a caldera which spread huge
amounts of volcanic ash over Cappacocia, during millions of
years, throughout the late Miocene-Pliocene interval," which
lasted from about 9.5 million to 3 million years ago, Antoine
said. Examples of similar calderas, albeit much smaller ones, are
Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines and Krakatoa,
a volcanic island west of Jakarta, Indonesia.

The so-called Çardak caldera is inactive today. Even so, thick
layers of volcanic ash have accumulated over millions of years.
"Then, erosion generated there among the most magnificent
landscapes I've ever seen," Antoine wrote.